August 24, 2012

The
online magazine Slate ran an essay
this week that asked the question, "Why Do We Love To Call New
Technologies 'Creepy'?" The article was written by Evan Selinger, an
associate professor of philosophy at Rochester Institute of Technology.

My
initial reaction to that essay, posted here, was critical, but Selinger
suggested in a tweet that I'd missed his point, which he said was "'creepy'
discourse + normative analysis."

He's
right, I'm sure, that I missed his point – to be honest I don't know what
"normative analysis" is. So, with apologies to Selinger, I've
reworked the essay to ask, simply, What is it about some technologies that makes
us feel creepy?

There's
an obvious correlation between creepiness and novelty. It's not unusual to be suspicious of strangers, especially when they have the potential to effect
some degree of change in our habitual sense of the world. With technologies as
with people, a measure of trust has to evolve.

Selinger's
essay mentions that early railroad passengers sometimes developed a variety of
symptoms that physicians came to recognize as manifestations of "train
sickness." He suggests these maladies were a reaction to the creepiness of
unfamiliarity, a form of "mania" that simply disappeared with time.
Without going into detail (or normative analysis), it's worth noting that the
experience of early train travel was considerably rougher and more dangerous than
it would become as technologies of comfort and safety evolved.

Still,
I don't doubt that (to borrow Robert Hughes' phrase) the "shock of the
new" had something to do with passengers' uneasiness. As a given technology
weaves its way into our lives the creepiness factor usually fades, as does its
"specialness" factor. We become acclimated to its presence, and then
dependent on it. The miraculous and frightening become routine. I say the creepiness
factor "usually" fades because it doesn't always. Plenty of people
still find flying on airplanes creepy, for example. I'm one of them. Still, during periods in my life when work required frequent air travel, creepiness faded and acclimation set in.

There
are two less obvious issues that help explain the creepiness we often feel in
response to technology. One is that we're intuitively aware that, in terms of
brute strength, technological power outstrips human power. You don't have to be
a religious fundamentalist to see that technology is about achieving a degree
of mastery over nature, other human beings, and ultimately death that was once
believed to be the exclusive purview of God. But we're also aware that
technological power cuts both ways, and thus is not only a source of security,
but also fear.

Human vs. Machine (and Machine/Human) in Desk Set

Immediately after reading Selinger's essay I happened to catch on TV a
showing of the old Katherine Hepburn/Spencer Tracy movie, Desk Set. The plot, for those who don't know it, revolves
around a group of women who staff the research department of a major television
network. Much of their working day is spent answering questions from the public
– someone wants to know who had the highest career batting average in the history of baseball, someone else asks
for the names of the reindeer in "The Night Before Christmas." The
women handle these calls with an impressive combination of dedication,
good humor, and smarts.

The conflict in the picture is supplied by the
installation in their department of a new, room-sized computer named EMERAC (a
variation of the names of the early computers UNIVAC and ENIAC), which the researchers
assume has been brought in to replace them. It
turns out (spoiler alert here) that the movie isn't really about the threat of
automation – that's just an excuse for a romantic comedy that revolves around
Hepburn's researcher falling in love with Tracy's
efficiency expert/computer engineer. It's a formula that requires a happy
ending, and indeed, in the end we learn that the researchers aren't fired,
EMERAC is only there to help them.

That the plot goes in this
direction perhaps explains why there's a note in the film's opening credits thanking
IBM for its assistance in the production. In any event, by the end, Hepburn's
character (who's named, surely not by coincidence, Miss Watson) is cheerfully
learning to use the computer and cooing affectionately as it spits out answers
to questions. Human and machine learn to live in mutually supportive
collaboration; mistrust and fear give way to admiration and gratitude; the
researcher accepts the engineer's proposal of marriage.

This seems a bit disingenuous. In truth, there's good reason for the
researchers of Desk Set to fear the arrival of EMERAC. Countless workers, from the onset of the
Industrial Revolution to today, have
been replaced by machines. Technology has the power to make us obsolete, and we
know it. That's creepy.

A merger of man and machine goes poorly in David Cronenberg's The Fly

The
second fundamental issue that the creepiness question raises is an existential
one. It involves the alienation that exists between two separate orders of
being: the organic and the mechanical. That's what the uncanny valley is about,
I think. We instinctively recognize that a machine is trying to sneak across
that boundary, and it puts us on our guard. A similar discomfort may be at the root of the creepiness some people feel about flying: there's just something unnatural about it.

Desk
Set gets lots of mileage out of this tension. The computer and the female
technician who's brought in to attend it are both portrayed as cold, relentless
intruders into a human community. Stanley Kubrick played brilliantly on that tension, too, defining the character of HAL
in 2001 with two radically incongruous features: a heartless, staring eye
and a voice that oozed creamy sincerity.

I
realize not everyone agrees that a firm line exists between human beings and
technology. There's no reason, many believe, we can't share ontological space
with one another. Certainly the transhumanist point of view is that nothing
could be more natural than humans merging with their machines. “[I]t is our
special character, as human beings, to be forever driven to create, co-opt,
annex, and exploit nonbiological props and scaffoldings," writes Andy
Clark, author of Natural Born Cyborgs. "…Tools-R-Us, and always have
been.”

I
don't buy it, or, more accurately, I don't buy the implication that such
adaptations are necessarily desirable. Human/machine intimacy is as likely to
produce mutation as it is enhancement, in my opinion. This is a view that draws
me to the work of artists like David Cronenberg and Philip K. Dick and
philosophers like Jacques Ellul and Herbert Marcuse.

One
of the more eloquent expositions of this perspective came from the theologian
Paul Tillich. Like other existentialists, Tillich believed that uneasiness is endemic to the human condition. It's weird being aware that we exist and
weird knowing that we're going to die. Our predicament leaves us with
persistent feelings of, as Tillich put it, "uncanniness."

We've
come up with lots of ways to avoid those feelings, and technology is high on
the list. On one level we find technology reassuring because we think we can
control it.Even though we may not
understand how it works, we believe it behaves, Tillich says, by rational, logical,
"calculable" rules. We can surround ourselves with it, cloak
ourselves in it, and feel secure. Tillich cites the home as an example. Its
“coziness,” he wrote, holds “the uncanniness of infinite space” at bay. What
the house or apartment offers individuals, the city offers humans en mass.

Like
so many palliatives, however, technology can turn on us. It may not be as
safely in control as we'd hoped. The potential for unease grows as our
technologies become more powerful, more complex, and more self-determined. On
some level we're aware that the relentless logic they're following is their
own. We know they're not truly alive, but they seem to be. We wonder whose
agenda is being followed. Creepiness ensues.

"As
the technical structures develop an independent existence," Tillich wrote,
"a new element of uncanniness emerges in the midst of what is most well
known. And this uncanny shadow of technology will grow to the same extent that
the whole earth becomes the 'technical city' and the 'technical house.'"

Tillich ends this passage with a pertinent, and creepy, question: "Who can still control it?"

August 15, 2012

The July issue of Wired magazine includes an interview with Peter Diamandis, who can fairly be described as one of the more prominent
technological enthusiasts on the planet. Among other things, Diamandis is a co-founder
of Singularity University, co-author of Abundance: The Future is Better than You
Think, and co-chairman of Planetary Resources, the company that recently announced plans to mine precious metals from asteroids in outer space.

The first question Wired asks Diamandis is whether he's always
wanted to change the world.

"No," he answers.
"My first ambition was to get off the world."

He goes on the explain that
he's dreamed since childhood of helping humanity become a "multiplanetary
species." We're driven genetically to
explore, he explains, but there's more to it than that.

"I believe we have a
moral obligation to back up the biosphere, take it off-planet, and give
ourselves the safety of ubiquity."

The phrase "the safety
of ubiquity" caught my eye. It reminded me of a comment by another of the world's
leading technological enthusiasts, Ray Kurzweil.

Kurzweil is the author of The Singularity is Near, which predicts
that by 2045 humans will merge with their machines, creating a new race of immortal
super-beings. He's also Peter Diamandis' co-founder at Singularity University. Among the many fantastic
predictions Kurzweil makes in his book is this
one, on page 29:

The law of
accelerating returns will continue until nonbiological intelligence comes close
to 'saturating' the matter and energy in our vicinity of the universe with our
human-machine intelligence…Ultimately the entire universe will become saturated
with our intelligence. This is the destiny of the universe.

Set aside for the moment the
presumption that we can know the destiny of the universe. The question I would
like to ask Kurzweil and Diamandis is whether they've taken a good look lately
at conditions here on Planet Earth.

If they have, I would then
hope they might be able to tell us how they can possibly look forward with
eagerness to the day when human intelligence will "saturate the universe,"
and on what basis they could describe such a state of affairs as "the
safety of ubiquity."

In proportion as men can command the immediate and vulgar applause of
others, they become indifferent to that which is remote and difficult of
attainment.

William Hazlitt (1777-1830)

As noted in my post on blogging yesterday, in theory it's possible to strike a reasonable
balance on the web between contributing something worthwhile and naked self promotion. I
also noted that in the technological society striking a reasonable balance is
not a priority. Case in point: the notoriety of the Internet's latest "It"
girl, Cat Marnell.

The second of three articles on Marnell in New York
magazine called her "the famously drug-addled beauty editor."
She gained a substantial following, we're told, covering cosmetics for the web
site xoJane.com, where she wrote as much about her addictions as she did about
makeup. Her employers asked her to enter rehab. She did, briefly, got bored, resumed
her habits, and left xoJane.com. Soon thereafter she landed an agent, a
lucrative book deal, and a position as the
"narcissism and pills" editor at another web site. Reality television producers are said to be in hot
pursuit.

A
few quotes convey the range and depth of Marnell's persona:

On the symbiosis between
cosmetics and drugs: "I’m bad all of the time, and beauty products are
fixing me. Without beauty products, I would have never gotten through my life.
I owe everything to them. They’ve afforded me unlimited debauchery." (New Yorkmagazine, April 15, 2012)

On
leaving xoJane.com: “I'm always on drugs. I
couldn’t spend another summer meeting deadlines behind a computer at night when
I could be on the rooftop of Le Bain looking for shooting stars and smoking
angel dust with my friends and writing a book, which is what I’m doing next.” (New York Post, June 14, 2012)

On
why her blog posts became so popular: "I
think what people really want to see right now is someone who’s being honest
about being a complete mess. I’m really, deeply unhappy all of the time, but I
just work it. But I’m also on speed all the time, like I'm on speed right now,
so I never shut up. So like, people get to hear about it and I think they like
that. It feels like a running narrative."
(New York magazine, June 18, 2012)

On why she was an hour and half late for an
interview: “I’m using drugs very heavily this week, O.K.? And
it’s screwed up my whole body.” (New York Times, August 8, 2012)

Marnell
demonstrates the maxim that nothing succeeds like excess, the coarser the better. It's a formula that's become infinitely more relevant in an age of
information overload. On the web, only the loud survive. As mentioned above, Marnell left xoJane.com,
but a quick look at the site reveals that she's far from the only writer there
who's learned that Outrageous = Attention = Success. A deputy editor named Mandy,
for example, offers a piece headlined, "I Can't Stop Hate-Masturbating to Paul Ryan." Here's an excerpt:

I mean maybe the porn-loop
in my brain goes like: "Hey Paul Ryan, my name is Mandy Stadtmiller, and
I'm going to change you. You are no longer going to be a hate-swilling,
personhood-advocating, steal-from-the-poor-give-to-the-rich-propagating, right-wing,
complete and total messenger of Satan dickhead lying evil Republican asshole
because we are about to have the most penultimate fuckfest in the history of
fuckfests."

And maybe he's like,
"------."

Because he doesn't say
anything at all. Because THAT'S WHEN HE JUST FULL ON FUCKS ME. He lifts my
skirt up, moves my panties aside, zips down his trou and fully just goes for it
while we're on top of the Lincoln
monument and stuff.

In
the "news you can use" category there's a column headlined, "Every Month Is Anal Sex Month With These
Simple Tips." Its author, Emily, is xoJane.com's managing editor. She's also an
anal sex enthusiast. "I love
everything about butt sex," she gushes. "I love having it, talking about it, fantasizing about it."

I offer these examples not because I find them shocking but because I find them stupid. Apparently
they're intended to convey an attitude of freedom and empowerment. The profile for xoJane.com's namesake, celebrity
editor Jane Pratt, says that her motto is "Live and let
live." Her "Anti-motto" is "Judge." Her site's mission
statement reads as follows:

xoJane.com is where women go when they are being
selfish, and where their selfishness is applauded.

Now that's a formula for success.

Is modern culture being overwhelmed
by an epidemic of childishness? José Ortega y Gasset, writing in 1930, thought so. Annals of Childish Behavior™ chronicles contemporary examples of that
epidemic. The childish citizen, Ortega said, puts "no limit on
caprice" and behaves as if "everything is permitted to him and that
he has no obligations."

Photo Credit: New York magazine/Mint&Serf at the Broadway Chapter/Courtesy of Cat Marnell

August 14, 2012

A note
to my readers: I posted a version of this essay about a month ago and
subsequently took it down. I worried that some of the personal struggles it
discusses might serve to undermine the primary purpose of my blog, which is to
attract potential publishers to my book. Given the subject matter the essay
addresses, my reservations in that regard were both ironic and precisely to the
point. I also found that withdrawing the piece seemed to have a chilling
effect on my willingness to "put myself out there" in general. For those reasons I decided to put the essay back up, with some additional thoughts in
the two concluding paragraphs.

I'm breaking a blogging
silence of more than a month today to post something that for me is unusually
personal: Some reflections on the practice of blogging.

I started this blog for a
very specific reason. I needed to build a "platform" that would help
convince book publishers and agents that the book I've recently completed on
the history and philosophy of technology is worth investing in.

As everyone knows, we live
in an age of information overload, and any author in search of a publisher will
find that there's no shortage of available advice on how best to go about
succeeding in that environment. Virtually all of this advice focuses not on the
book itself but on the promotion of the book. To have any hope of gaining an
audience today an aspiring author must find some way to raise himself above the
crowd of other aspiring authors, all of whom, like him, have unprecedented
avenues of online access to the overloaded attentions of the public. Hence the
necessary construction of a platform.

A platform is advertising,
pure and simple. You stand on your platform and wave, frantically, thereby
turning yourself into a "brand." Many of those who offer advice on
how to get published literally use that term. Again, the quality of the book
isn't the issue. It's the recognizability of the author. Granted, it's possible
to become recognized for the quality of your ideas, but anyone who believes
that there's a correlation between recognizability and quality hasn't noticed
who's on the covers of supermarket tabloids lately. Impact – sensation – is
what matters, and in an age of information overload your best chance of
creating impact is to pummel easily digestible ideas into the collective
consciousness with machine-like regularity.

The pressures of platform
building take on an air of absurdity when your subject is the question
concerning technology. One of the things that's kept me from blogging recently
has been the completion of an article on Jacques Ellul for the
"Ideas" section of the Boston Globe. In that article I mentioned Ellul's belief
that human beings are increasingly struggling with the necessity of
accommodating themselves to the inhuman demands of technique. "Never
before," Ellul wrote,

has
the human race as a whole had to exert such efforts in its daily labors as it
does today a result of its absorption into the monstrous technical mechanism.
The tempo of man's work is not the traditional, ancestral tempo; nor is its aim
the handiwork which man produced with pride, the handiwork in which he
contemplated and recognized himself….What was once the abnormal has become the
usual, standard condition of things.

I realize that my complaints
about this will likely come off as useless whining, a self-serving reluctance
to face up to the conditions of the modern world as it is. If you can't stand
the heat, get out of the kitchen, etcetera. I find chilling the eagerness with
which so many today are willing to adapt themselves and others to technical
demands, striving as they do to turn necessity into a virtue.

It's true that some people
feel perfectly at home in the rapid-fire world of the daily blog and do
genuinely valuable work there. More power to them. It's true as well that
amidst all the superficial tripe, technology does offer us incredibly
convenient opportunities to engage with an infinite variety of important,
incisive information. As many have noted before me, though, it's the
overwhelming volume of the flow that's the problem.

It's often said that in
order to keep from drowning in information we must learn to filter out what we
don't need. Easier said than done. Filtering is a labor-intensive,
consciousness-absorbing activity. It goes back to what Huxley said about the
doors of perception, and to what the philosopher Don Ihde has said about the
inevitable trade-off we make when we use technologies of amplification: In the
process of focusing we narrow. Looking through a microscope allows us to see
micro-organisms, but while looking at them we can no longer see the table we’re
sitting at, or the room we’re sitting in, or the stars.

Ellul often repeated the
maxim that at some point a change in quantity becomes a change in quality. The
Internet carried us past that point long ago.

Sages regularly insist that
it is through contemplation that one gains insight into the true nature of
things. Plotinus said in the third century that the discernment of spiritual
truth requires one to "watch in quiet till it suddenly shines upon us;
preparing ourselves for the blessed spectacle as the eye waits patiently for
the setting sun." It seems evident that a culture that celebrates sounding
off at every opportunity drives itself in precisely the opposite direction.

Another reason I haven't
been posting blog entries recently is that I've been depressed about the lack
of response my book has received from the agents I've approached. Depression,
of course, is one of those human inconstancies that interfere with the flow of
production, and for which technique has accordingly supplied numerous technical
(pharmaceutical) remedies. My reluctance to employ these remedies has led to
delays in the construction of my platform, for which I have no one but myself
to blame.

Samuel Taylor
Coleridge

The latest agent to reject
my book said that in his opinion it's better suited for the "academic or
professional market" than for general-interest readers. It could be that
he hoped to deliver the bad news with as few words and as little insult as
possible. He may have hated what I'd written for any number of reasons and been
too polite to say so. Nonetheless there was an implication in what he did say
that my book would require more heavy lifting intellectually than the average
consumer today will tolerate. Perhaps that's an accurate assessment. Even if it
is, though, it's a sad surrender to the vicissitudes of technique.

It just so happened that on
the day I received that last rejection I was absorbed in Richard Holmes'
magnificent two-volume biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Although I don't
begin to compare my own talents to Coleridge's, I noted with particular
interest the following passage, in which Coleridge responded to criticisms that
his essays were too obscure for general readers:

I must of necessity require the attention of my
Reader to become my fellow-labourer…to retire into themselves and make their
own minds the objects of their steadfast attention…No real information can be
conveyed, no important errors rectified, no widely injurious prejudices rooted
up, without requiring some effort of thought on the part of the Reader. But the
obstinate (and towards a contemporary Writer, the contemptuous) aversion to all
intellectual effort is the mother evil of which I had proposed to war against,
the Queen Bee in the Hive of our errors and misfortunes, both private and
national.

I'm a reporter by nature as
well as experience. That means that I'm a reactor more than an initiator. I
enjoy collecting and synthesizing ideas from disparate sources. In the process
of doing so I hope to make an original contribution. I'm also a reflector,
meaning one who reflects. It's not in my nature to churn stuff out. Building a
platform doesn't always lend itself to those pursuits.

A recent essay in the
Guardian newspaper questioned whether using social media to build an audience
for books is as effective as it's supposed to be. Its author, Ewan
Morrison, noted the advice of social media gurus that authors should spend 20
per cent of their time writing and 80 per cent of their time building a platform. Its seems obvious that this "20/80
rule" is a classic case of putting the cart before the horse. Put another
way, it demonstrates the accuracy of a phenomenon frequently noted by Jacques Ellul:
that the technological society constantly demands that we focus our attention on
means rather than ends.

There's a reasonable balance
to be struck, I hope, between naked self promotion and making a thoughtful contribution to the
discussion. The 20/80 rule isn't it. As Ellul also
frequently noted, reasonable balance isn't a quality the technological society takes very seriously.

About Me

I'm a journalist who has spent the past 20 years studying the history and philosophy of technology. I am currently submitting my book, "Not So Fast: Thinking Twice About Technology," to publishers.
This blog comments on issues concerning technology as they arise in current events or in my ongoing studies. Follow me on Twitter at @DougHill25